Nice retort. But I think I know a little about the business aspect of the music industry, seeing as I work for a record label and have been working there for several years.
I know the marketing value of freely distributing content, but that doesn't make the content itself advertisements. As I said before, getting a music video played on MTV is no different than getting a song played on the radio. From a business perspective, it is advertising, but so is touring. That doesn't mean that the song or music video or live performance lose their inherent entertainment & artistic value.
Prior to a release we send out thousands of albums as promos. We even print and package these discs specifically for promo purposes. Does that make those CDs any different from the ones that get shipped to stores? Does writing "promo" on the cover suddenly make that CD just a piece of advertisement and make the content lose its intrinsic entertainment value? Oh, but those promo CDs have no "financial viability" and they're only used to facilitate sales...
Just because it's labeled as promotional content in one form doesn't mean the content itself is just an advertisement. People still go out and buy music video compilations, posters, stickers, shirts, etc. that were all originally intended by the label to promote the album or band. Pretty much all merchandise that the label has made is used for promoting/advertising the band or a particular album--that's their financial justification; that's business.
We pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a recording remastered in order to re-release it and sell more albums, but the remastered content isn't just advertising, and neither is the fact that it's remastered since it does in fact sound much better than the original. Just 'cause something is paid for because of its promotional/marketing value doesn't make it lose its inherent value. The label's intent doesn't derogate from the artist's vision or how one enjoys the content. Interviews are arranged by the label in order to give publicity to the band and/or the album, but that is completely inconsequential to the content that is created. Your argument is based on very selective reasoning.
I mean, why would people want to trade/download/collect/buy music videos if all they are are advertisements? What part of the process of creating a visual narrative to go with a song categorically reduces the artistic and entertainment value of the final product?
It's a question of semantics. Purpose vs. Intent. The creators of the video may not intend to create advertising, but the people who paid for it definitly do.
It's not a question of semantics. It's simply poor reasoning. Playing a video on MTV may be used to promote an album, but that doesn't make the content itself an advertisement, just like playing a single off the album on the radio may be used to promote sales, but that doesn't change the artistic merit of that track.
The purpose of a music video is to make direct attention to other, money making, ventures. The album, the tour, the t-shirt. Music videos are made, at significant expense, to get attention paid to these ventures. Sounds a lot like an advertisement to me.. The 30 second spot promoting a soft drink has exactly the same purpose, to direct attention to the money making venture.
As I said before, from a business perspective, touring is done mainly to promote an album also. The record label forks out money to give bands touring support because they see it as promotion for the band and the album, which increase the fanbase and subsequently sales. Touring itself would not generate much revenue for the band if it weren't for the sale or merchandise on the tour, and it doesn't generate any direct revenue at all for the label. But that doesn't mean that the live performances are simply advertisements. Likewise, just because music videos, like radio singles and touring, may serve to promote the band and the album, it doesn't mean that that is their sole purpose.
Ask yourself, why would anybody spend all that money to produce a video and then even more money trying very hard to get that video show publicly, if not to advertise?
Why would record labels fork out thousands of dollars for touring support? It serves to advertise the album, but the content still retains its intrinsic entertainment/artistic value. Art and entertainment aren't defined by their financial viability. There are indie bands and directors that create music videos which aren't ever played on MTV or VH1. Why do you think they spend the time and effort to make these videos? Believe it or not, some artists aren't just in it for the money.
Only a very narrow minded idiot would try and stop people from trading music their videos. Their entire reason for benign is to generate attention. Pearl Jam may be the first to use creative commons, but this is far from the first time someone has used nerd culture for free PR. The tech press is notoriously naive.
It's not not narrowminded, it's shortsighted. But why would anyone want to trade music videos, collect them, or buy them on DVDs if they're just advertisement? How do people like Chris Cunningham make money by selling music video compilations if all they are are advertisements?
An artist doesn't release their content under a free license, then they're being idiots. An artist does release their content under a free icense--they're just greedy sell-outs that want free PR. What exactly do you want from musicians?
People don't buy videos. They buy albums and singles. And don't get all pedantic on me about how some people do buy videos, its a teeny-tiny minority of sales, and would not be financially viable if the videos were not already made for some other reason, like say, advertising.
Stating that people do purchase music videos isn't pedantic, neither is stating that lots of people simply enjoy watching music videos and appreciate them for their intrinsic entertainment/artistic value. Whether video sales are the main source of revenue for artists/labels is completely irrelevant. A creative work doesn't have to be profitable, or 'financially viable', to have artistic or entertainment value. Likewise, just because music videos boost sales doesn't mean that they are merely advertisements. Are singles just advertisements as well because they are played on the radio to boost sales? What about merchandise like t-shirts and posters? Touring and live performances would be 'financially unviable' too for most artists if merchandise weren't sold at each show. Does that mean that the musical performances themselves are just advertisements?
I happen to work in the music industry and know lots of musicians, many of whom have produced music videos with their bands. It is a very artistically driven process, much like the creation of any other creative work. The same energy and creative process goes into it as with the production of the album itself. It is simply adding a visual narrative to the music and gives the artist another channel to express themselves through. Playing a music video on MTV or VH1 is no different from playing a single on the radio. The intrinsic value of the creative content doesn't change just because it's being played to promote the album. Most of the music videos that indie artists produce don't even get any play on the air--which is why they are often hard to get funding for--but bands still push for them to be made just as they may push for the label to help them record an album regardless of whether it's going to sell or not. Directors like Chris Cunningham have made prolific careers out of just making music videos, which people watch and buy for its inherent entertainment value.
The simplest thing with the most utility that someone might do is rip the audio out of the video and make it into an mp3. But that would be a derivative work and is thus prohibited.
So yeah, this is a rather useless bit of fluff advertising, nothing more.
That is retarded. I'd venture to say that 99% of the people who download the video simply want to watch the video in its entirety. Downloading it just to rip the audio layer is like getting an illustrated book to cut out just the text. Just because you can't appreciate music videos for what they are doesn't mean that other people can't either. You don't seem to understand a lot of things about music or art.
Your statements are tautological. Ofcourse the study of evolution is the study of how one adapts to environmental conditions. The driving force is survival, but the outcome is not always known--like how a species might adapt to higher tempuratures.
There might infinite ways a species might adapt to the same environmental conditions, so it's not as trivial as you seem to think. And I don't think you fully understand the experiment they conducted.
They performed the experiment twice. But they may have collected millions of data points. For a genetic mutation to qualify as evolutionary change and be relevant to the subject, it has to effect the majority of the population. Depending on the population size, the genetic mutation may have been reproduced in several hundred to several million or more individuals.
And there is nothing wrong with creating a theory after a single experiment. Just because there's only been one or two experiments doesn't mean you can't produce a scientific hypothesis. Afterall, that is the whole point of conducting the experiment. Without a theory proposal, what predictions are you going to try to test in future experiments?
I don't think you understand what a theory is. It's just a hypothesis to be tested by experimentation. The more its predictions have been tested and confirmed, the more it will be accepted. If future experiments produce results contrary to the predictions, it may refute the theory. Over time, incorrect/inaccurate theories will inevitably give way to correct/more accurate ones. So there's nothing wrong or unsound about producing a theory based on the results of just two experiments. It's not gonna end up in any textbooks until it is confirmed more rigorously, but the process has to start somewhere.
Not as "brain dead" as someone who hasn't a clue about the purpose of the FDA, EPA, and other regulatory agencies that prevent industries and self-interested corporate entities (which allow individuals to be relieved of personal responsibility for their actions in their money/power/resource grab) from destroying society.
Without government, what recourse do you have against a megacorporation that is polluting your environment, creating health hazards, monopolizing resources, or encroaching on your civil liberties?
Without government regulation, who's to protect consumers from a meat procuder that knowling sells beef contaminated by mad cow disease? or an automobile manufacturer that sells unsafe vehicles? or power companies that create fake shortages to hike-up prices artificially?
I suppose you think we should go back to the days when labor exploitation was legal, it was ok to use whatever dangerous ingredients you wanted in food products, drug manufacturers didn't have to label or test their products before selling them to the masses, and corporations had no accountability for their environmental, economic, or social impact?
"Another band that releases shit for the sake of money just because they can"
What is that supposed to mean?
They produced a music video, as musicians sometimes do.
They released it under a Creative Commons license, which is rare.
This allows people to do rare things with a mainstream artist's creative content, like download it/enjoy it/distribute it for free.
Most artists would have prohibited the above mentioned activities in their license.
Thus, what Pearl Jam has done is interesting news for most of us, and it would benefit fans if other artists followed Pearl Jam's lead.
So what is there for you to possibly complain about? That they haven't sold many CDs at your store? What does that have to do with anything?
Do you have a coherent point to make, or did you just want to post incoherent ramblings?
Playing a music video on MTV may be considered advertising for the album, but so is playing the single on the radio. That doesn't make the actual content devoid of artistic & entertainment value in itself. I collect music videos, both downloaded off the net and purchased on DVDs, so I don't think that they're just advertisements. They should be available for free in addition to for purchase on DVDs, but saying that their just advertisements is an insult to the people who work on the videos.
I don't get why people complain about IP and anti-piracy laws, but when artists actually start embracing the whole music-sharing rhetoric people get upset that it gets reported and accuse the artists of pulling a publicity stunt.
I mean, are we trying to convince artists that we don't want them to let people download/share music for free? What is the problem here? What does it take for people to stop complaining about the music industry?
Where the hell did you get "it's free until May 24th" from? It's licensed under the Creative Commons license. That means you can freely download/distribute it indefinitely. May 24th is just when the official download will no longer be available. The whole point of allowing fans to distribute it is to--duh--allow fans to distribute it.
And you can download it in a variety of formats. The flash version is just for the convenience of people who want to stream it from their browser. If you want it in AVI format, you can download it from the link on the side.
Your reading comprehension & website navigation abilities are the only things here that are pathetic. If you wanna complain about something, atleast try to grasp what the situation is...
If the artists actually cared about getting their music out, they wouldn't mind people sharing videos or even the albums. The reason why the record labels care is because they're too shortsighted and greedy. Most record execs just can't stand the notion of people enjoying the content for free. It doesn't matter that this creates more buzz, more fans, more sales in the long run--it's the principles. It's just like people who complain about hand-outs being given to the less fortunate (I mean, are you really jealous of people who get hand-outs because they actually need them?). They're the kind of people who worry more about welfare going to a few freeloaders than taking comfort in the fact that it also helps millions of single mothers and dispossessed families keep food on the table.
It's irrational stinginess that serves no purpose, but is just ingrained in prevailing industry attitudes. So most labels don't put out music videos for free because they want everyone to buy the DVD if they actually want to watch the music video. They don't see that a music video played on millions of people's computers has the same marketing value as one played on millions of television sets on MTV or VH1. There's really nothing wrong with selling music videos on DVDs, but it is in the best interest of the musicians and the label to also provide the content for free.
It has nothing to do with fear of people extracting the audio layer from the music videos. That's just ridiculous. What Pearl Jam is doing is definitely appreciated by a lot of fans, and it isn't being done by most mainstream musicians so I don't get why people are accusing them of just pulling a "publicity stunt". Just because it's in their best interest doesn't mean it's a publicity stunt. This is actually good for the fans as well, and it might encourage others to follow suit.
Sentiments like yours only hinder the adoption of these rational approaches to content distribution. I work for an indie record label, and I'm always trying to convince my boss that it makes sense to allow people to share music and to be more genrous with the content. But it really undermines these efforts when people like you react so cynically whenever a label starts thinking more progressively than others.
Why can't you simply accept that Pearl Jam is trying to do something nice for the fans?--which in turn also benefits the artist, which has always been the case. It's not good enough that they're derogating from conventions in a way that benefits the fans, but they must hurt themselves in the process for it to not be labelled as simply a "publicity stunt"?
I think people like you are a bit too jaded and don't really understand or appreciate what the music sharing movement is about. Artists and record labels don't have an obligation to take losses just so you can enjoy the music they produce, however, there are practices that are mutually beneficial. Just because the artists/labels stand to benefit from the content they produce doesn't mean that they're evil or something. So stop ragging on the good guys in the industry who are actually embracing free content and music sharing.
Except music videos aren't advertisements; how does adding a cinematic dimension to the musical content reduce it to advertising?
Music videos may be used to advertise the album, but so are the songs on the album when they're played on the radio or broadcasted elsewhere--does that the album itself an "advertisement"? Touring also helps sell albums--does that mean concert goers are just being suckered into paying for "advertisements"?
And just because you can't make money off of the video or create derivative works from it doesn't mean it's not free anymore. They're being a lot more generous with their work than most major artists and are setting a good precendent for others to follow. So stop skewing the situation just so you can make substanceless complaints.
This has nothing to do with bandwidth quotas. It has to do with the quality of the connection and connection priority. You will still be charged by the volume of traffic, but you will also have to pay extra for connection reliability/availability.
Basically it allows the ISPs to provide you with a crappy connection by default unless you pay a premium to have priority over other internet traffic. This means they can now oversell their connection as a standard practice and then charge people extra to actually be provided with the service that they signed up/paid for.
It's rather unethical in my opinion. When I pay for webhosting I expect 99% uptime. I shouldn't have to pay extra to actually be guaranteed the service I already paid for. If there is a bandwidth shortage, then the ISP needs to upgrade or not oversell their bandwidth.
Imagine if your cellphone provider only offered you service 25% of the time unless you agreed to pay another extra monthly fee to be a "tier 1" customer. You wouldn't be able to use your cellphone when you want/need to. And even when you do manage to get service there'd be no guarantee that the person at the other end of the line will have service. It would effectively make cellphone communication unviable and useless.
The same principles apply to the internet. The internet is meant to be a persistent communications medium. If the tiered internet becomes a reality, only the largest websites and web service providers will be accessible by anyone from anywhere at any time. Other smaller sites/services will suffer a degradation in service quality in terms of reliability and availability such that accessing them would be a hassle to most users. The negative social and economic impact this would have on the internet would be enormous.
A primary characteristic of a police state is a mutually suspicious self-spying citizenry. The Nazis were able to retain so tight a grip on its citizens and on public attitudes because the entire German population became its informants. Much more realistic than having undercover agents around every corner was to simply have neighbors spy on neighbors, and use the public's own distrust of each other to turn them on themselves.
In fact, the Gestapo didn't have very many undercover agents except those used to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups. They relied primarily on denunciations submitted by ordinary citizens to "spy" on the public and keep tight control over German society. It was the willingness of ordinary Germans to denounce one another that supplied the Gestapo with a list of individuals to arrest and gave them their power. What is scarier: the thought that there might be NSA-employed domestic spies embedded in society or that your neighbors or any other ordinary citizen may be a potential government informant?
In an effective police state Big Brother doesn't need to be everywhere because the citizenry will spy on itself. You are naive if you think it's alright as long as it's ordinary citizens doing the spying, or that police states only exist when government surveilence infiltrates one's home.
I understand your point, but it still remains that unless proponents of ODF push for accessibility features to be added to other word-processors, the disabled community will only be left with one option. Under the current conditions, Word may be the best tool for their needs. But have you considered that handicapped individuals have just as diverse needs as non-handicapped individuals? If Word isn't good enough for the entire non-disabled community, then how is it good enough for the entire disabled community? What about disabled persons who prefer Linux and open source solutions?
The way I see it is, if the ODF movement is dedicated to providing "choices" to users, they should not neglect the disabled community.
First off, blindness isn't the only kind of disability out there. Secondly, you don't seem to have any clue as to what kind of accessibility features are included with Word. Just because you have never had to use these features, and thus have never looked for them, does not mean that they don't exist. Also, our society's general failure to take into account the needs of the disabled is not justification for the continuance of this problem.
Right now there are tons of features that make Word more usable for people with all sorts of disbilities. A lot of these features are used by people without handicaps as well. We don't realize that they provide vital accessibility improvements for the handicapped because they seem to accomplish tasks that are trivial for us. But for people with disabilities, these features indispensible. If you want to get a better idea of the kind of features that Microsoft offers for the disabled, then visit the Microsoft Accessibility website. Please educate yourself before spouting off ignorant uninformed nonsense.
Lastly, if you can't see the vendor lock-in (and other problems) created by the situations you described then you really need to think a bit harder (Hint: Imagine if you were handicapped). Your inability to empathize with others in a different situation from yours is really quite sad.
That's not the point. One of the main benefits of ODF is supposed to be the prevention of vendor lock-ins due to the use of proprietary formats. It's designed as an open alternative to Word documents, and many (including government agencies) plan to migrate to ODF. This is supposed to save people a lot of money and make public documents more accessible.
Saying "oh, disabled people can just stick to Word" leaves the disabled community in practically the same situation as before, except that now there's a higher chance that they'll encounter machines with some word-processor other than MS Word installed on it.
The disabled community just want to be able to receive the same benefits from ODF as the rest of society. I mean, why should they be locked in to a single vendor? How can schools/public institutions switch over to free software by adopting ODF if non-MS packages don't have accessibility options for the disabled?
This isn't about whether disabled people can still use ODF--it's whether the ODF movement is really about the values and ideals that its proponents expound. ODF advocates claim there are benefits to the adoption of an open format, but they seem to ignore a significant segment of our society with special needs; that is what the DPC is afraid of. And comments like yours simply confirm their fears.
Oh, so you were advocating peace? Gosh, I wasn't aware that Improv Everywhere was going around instigating violence and carrying out acts of aggression against others. I thought they were just "disruptive" in the sense that they planned interactive public performances that involved the audience in a direct and personal way . Thus, disrupting the mundane situations that they inject these performances into.
I'm sorry, I totally misjudged you. Apparently you're just a peace-loving fellow who wants to put an end to the Improv Everywhere menace that has been terrorizing the community. Your disparaging remarks and condescending tone definitely do not make you come off as an asshole. Clearly you're not being too uptight about people simply wearing blue polo shirts and khaki pants in a cleverly engineer situation (the audacity of these people...). All of us who find these performances amusing must be 'morons' just as you say...
Funny, you deny being overly uptight, but you seem to have a rudely condescending attitude towards people who simply enjoy a little benign and lighthearted fun. Is my recreational drug use (done in the privacy of my own home) too disruptive as well? Or are you simply a dick towards drug users because you just don't like people who lead a different lifestyle from yours?
You can call anything that affects you 'disruptive'. Anything that captures your eye briefly, causes you to break a stride, throws you slightly off your usual routine, or simply makes you pause for a moment's thought can be considered disruptive. Simply seeing two guys make-out in public, which you may not be used to, can be extremely disruptive to some people. Just because it's disruptive doesn't make it wrong or necessarily bad. If seeing two guys making-out upsets you, maybe you just need to get out more and learn to be more open-minded. You can choose to be annoyed by the slightest unexpected situation, or you can choose not to.
For instance, in college I was always very sociable towards other people, especially my freshman year since I was from out of state and didn't know anyone at my school. I said 'Hi' to everyone I met and made an effort to socialize with complete strangers. This was well-received by most people, and I immediately made a lot of friends. However, there were always one or two people who, no matter how many times I greeted, would never reply or even acknowledge my presence.
I'm sure those individuals probably found my persistent efforts to socialize with them to be very disruptive. It may have even annoyed them (which is why I eventually gave up). But in the context of the situation, I was just trying to be friendly, and they simply weren't used to it or something.
There will always be people like that--people who don't want to engage in smalltalk at the bus stop, people who avoid eye contact when they walk past you, or give you dirty looks when you smile at them, but that doesn't mean we should all just go through our daily routines avoiding any kind of social interactions with each other because some people might find it 'disruptive' or 'annoying'. Maybe that's what you'd call 'peaceful', but I call it 'boring'.
Similarly, just because you choose to be annoyed by a little harmless fun doesn't mean the IE agents are in the wrong. The improv players in the video weren't approaching any customers or getting in people's way. They were just standing around in blue poloshirts and khaki pants. Most people seem to find the sessions entertaining, including the bystanders involved from all the videos I've seen. The only people getting irrate about it seem to be those with a compulsive need to keep people in line at all times--cops, for instance. So it seems like you're just too uptight about all of this.
Yes, you have the right to be a dick, but that's what makes these improv sessions so hilarious sometimes. Some people are just too uptight and get easily annoyed by completely harmless lighthearted fun.
Unfortunately for people like you, public places are shared by everyone--including people who like to create "disruptive" social situations in an attempt to inject humor and an element of the unexpected into the lives of people around them. Best Buy may not be public property, but it is publicly accessible nonetheless, and all members of the public are invited to frequent the stores. If you don't like it, you can open your own electronics store and bar whomever you want from entering it.
Some people appreciate the departure from the mundane and enjoy a little spontaneity in their lives. Others, who can't handle not being in complete control of a situation, might lose their cool and react with hostility. That's just a risk that these individuals have to take, and it's something that, unfortunately, everyone else in society also has to put up with.
So just as you have the right to act like you've got a stick up your ass, others have the right to create absurd/comedic social situations in public places to try to make life more interesting. If you don't want to be "disrupted" by unexpected situations, then stay home. Because as soon as you step foot out that door, you are no longer in control. People are free to make offhand remarks, act silly, or otherwise be as disruptive as they want without encroaching on your rights as an individual. You can either piss and moan about other people having a little harmless, or you can just learn to not be so uptight all the time.
I think the problem is more that most people tend to settle into a very comfortable daily routine that they simply don't like disrupted in any way. It threatens them when a new and alien situation arises and they don't know what to expect. How the employees reacted was perfectly understandable, but that's why they do these improv shows.
People have to realize that in life there will always been situations where you aren't in complete control and things can't be predicted. The key is not to immediately panic or react with hostility when such circumstances come up. Hopefully those that participated in the event involuntarily were able to step back and have a laugh at the end of it all after realizing how paranoid they reacted to a perfectly harmless situation.
Injecting a little unexpected humor into the lives of others can only improve our society. People need to lighten up and stop assuming the worst about each other.
How is he manipulating people? I see Improv Everywhere as people who want to make the lives of those around them more interesting. It's a creative and humorous way to disrupt mundane reality, much like culture jamming movements. Compared to trying to psychoanalyze other people and putting them down for harmless well-intentioned public stunts, I'd say you exhibit more negative personality traits than these individuals. You're looking to hard to find malicious intentions where there is none. They aren't persecuting, bullying, exploiting, manipulating, or otherwise hurting other people. They just enjoy creating interesting social situations that most participants can get a good laugh from. Perhaps if one is too uptight, it would be a nuisance and irrate them, but I think that's the exact kind of uptightness that these groups of people intend to disrupt.
You can say that about any art form. Groundbreaking works only come around ever so often. That's what makes them 'groundbreaking'. You can't expect every piece of anime/cinema/whatever to be exceptional--otherwise they really wouldn't be 'exceptional' then, would they?
What makes a masterpiece a masterpiece is its relative ingenuity/brilliance compared to the rest of the genre. So no matter how much a particular genre advances or improves as a whole, there inevitably will only be a handful that is set apart from the rest as phenomenal works--just as most pro athletes today are probably on par or better than legendary hall-of-famers of the past, but in the contemporary landscape only a few stand out. If every anime was "exceptional", then really none of them would be exceptional.
As an art form, anime is still advancing steadily just as it always has. As with all art, it will always be dominated by established mainstream themes and conventions that become hackneyed and repetitive over time. Mainstream cultural segments naturally stagnate due to a lack of experimentation--which only occurs in cultural fringes. But ever so often, a fringe breakthrough in creative/artistic thinking will gain widespread success and popularity, rippling through the entire cultural landscape of the art/genre, thus reshaping it. As its success seeps into the mainstream, those qualities which had set it apart from the rest will gradually be adopted by others until that particular creative/artistic fringe is fully assimilated into the mainstream...and becomes hackneyed and repetitive.
That's just how art works. It's the same with all art forms, including: anime, music, movies, videogame design, and even software development. Real ingenuity is always rare and only comes from cultural fringes. And such groundbreaking phenomena only last but a brief moment until it is appropriated by the mainstream due to its own success, at which point the audience becomes disatisfied once again and demands something more groundbreaking.
You can just as easily find crappy animes produced in earlier decades as you can find contemporary ones that are the same stupid drivel. In fact, I'd argue that since anime has gained greater popularity--and thus more creative energy and resources--it's actually a lot more innovative in recent years than in the past. We just only remember good animes which have endured as classics while our collective cultural memory simply forgets about all the crappy ones.
Well, if you set a max-width property, aren't people still going to complain if their resolution width is higher than the max-width?
The problem with autoresizing layouts is that you lose a lot of editorial control over content layout. For pages that are just straight-forward single-article documents, this isn't much of a problem. However, most home pages of large, content-rich sites follow a magazine/newspaper-frontpage layout. So the content is divided up into several columns and panels with custom graphics accompany different features. Most of the graphics are typically the width of a single column of text, or multiple columns if that panel happens to span more than one regular column. Now, the column text can easy expand horizontally with the layout, but the graphics will stay the same size. This'll end up creating a lot of large patches of white-space in the middle of the page, which looks very ugly.
From an editor/graphic designer's perspective, a fixed width layout is really the best way to go. Aside from that, it's also much more annoying to read huge long lines of horizontal text than it is to simply scroll down a page as you read--hence why newspaper/magazine articles are written in columns, and why most documents are longer than they are wide.
The whole "wasted screen realestate" complaint is just jibberish. It's not as if you gain any extra value from a layout that takes up 100% of your screen's width. It's not like you're watching a movie and you actually get more out of having the picture fit your screen perfectly. It's still just the same amount of web content. Web layouts are designed to be around the same width as a normal physical document because that's really the ideal width for reading text.
When you read magazine you don't hold up the magazine so that all you can see in your field of vision is the page you're on. In fact that'd probably be pretty annoying. Even when you watch a movie you wouldn't want to be sitting so close to the screen so that the edges of the picture are rigth where your field of vision ends. So what difference does it make if there's extra screen space that isn't being used? Having a 30" monitor at 1900x1200 resolution doesn't mean you have to read everything from one edge of the screen to the other. If you have a 15" monitor and you have the resolution set that high then you're just being silly by setting the resolution at an unreadable level for yourself.
A Takashi Miike classic. He's the guy who also directed Ichi the Killer... a masterpiece of Japanese shock cinema.
D.O.A. is simply awesome. Tons of action, sex, gratuitous violence, and it's got some pretty hilarious moments as well. But be warned, there is jap scat and bestiality portrayed in this film. It's not as bad as Ichi the Killer in most ways, but it's still pretty unsettling. Definitely not for the feint of heart.
If you enjoy D.O.A., I'd also recommend:
Ichi the Killer -- The reason why Takashi Miike is a god amongst shock cinema fans
The Agitator -- Not a shock/gore flick, but a masterpiece nonetheless. I guess I'd describe it as The Godfather set in the Japanese Yakuza underworld (a favorite subject matter of Miike's).
Zebraman -- A film about an unlikely and hilariously absurd superhero.
Oldboy is a pretty awesome Korean movie you might enjoy if you like Ichi the Killer.
Why is it that Hollywood refuses to cast any full-blooded asian actresses/actors for the roles of asian characters? Devon Aoki has got to be the whitest looking "japanese" chick I have ever seen. She's only something like 1/5th or 1/4th japanese and has to be dressed up in komonos or other stereotypical japanese garmets to be identified as "oriental". Why not just cast an asian actress who actually looks the part naturally?
The problem with actresses like Devon Aoki is that they have to imitate preconceived hollywood archetypes of "orientalness" in order to portray the ethnic identity of their characters. This means wearing "asian" costumes and really ridiculous and exagerrated make-up--to give them "oriental" shaped eyes, etc. It also means portraying their character in such a way as to emulate (and perpetuate) cultural/ethnic stereotypes--did Aoki have a single spoken line in Sin City? Ofcourse not, she was just supposed to strike silly histrionic poses and look 'cute' and 'oriental'.
It'd be nice to actually see an asian character in a hollywood production portrayed as more than just a cultural/ethnic stereotype. All Devon Aoki characters completely lack emotional depth or any kind of discernible personality the audience can actually identify with. The focus is always on the exoticness, or 'otherness', of the character's ethnic/cultural identity, thus no effort is made to develop the role into anything more than just a flat, one-dimensional prop-character.
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Nice retort. But I think I know a little about the business aspect of the music industry, seeing as I work for a record label and have been working there for several years.
I know the marketing value of freely distributing content, but that doesn't make the content itself advertisements. As I said before, getting a music video played on MTV is no different than getting a song played on the radio. From a business perspective, it is advertising, but so is touring. That doesn't mean that the song or music video or live performance lose their inherent entertainment & artistic value.
Prior to a release we send out thousands of albums as promos. We even print and package these discs specifically for promo purposes. Does that make those CDs any different from the ones that get shipped to stores? Does writing "promo" on the cover suddenly make that CD just a piece of advertisement and make the content lose its intrinsic entertainment value? Oh, but those promo CDs have no "financial viability" and they're only used to facilitate sales...
Just because it's labeled as promotional content in one form doesn't mean the content itself is just an advertisement. People still go out and buy music video compilations, posters, stickers, shirts, etc. that were all originally intended by the label to promote the album or band. Pretty much all merchandise that the label has made is used for promoting/advertising the band or a particular album--that's their financial justification; that's business.
We pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a recording remastered in order to re-release it and sell more albums, but the remastered content isn't just advertising, and neither is the fact that it's remastered since it does in fact sound much better than the original. Just 'cause something is paid for because of its promotional/marketing value doesn't make it lose its inherent value. The label's intent doesn't derogate from the artist's vision or how one enjoys the content. Interviews are arranged by the label in order to give publicity to the band and/or the album, but that is completely inconsequential to the content that is created. Your argument is based on very selective reasoning.
I mean, why would people want to trade/download/collect/buy music videos if all they are are advertisements? What part of the process of creating a visual narrative to go with a song categorically reduces the artistic and entertainment value of the final product?
It's not a question of semantics. It's simply poor reasoning. Playing a video on MTV may be used to promote an album, but that doesn't make the content itself an advertisement, just like playing a single off the album on the radio may be used to promote sales, but that doesn't change the artistic merit of that track.
As I said before, from a business perspective, touring is done mainly to promote an album also. The record label forks out money to give bands touring support because they see it as promotion for the band and the album, which increase the fanbase and subsequently sales. Touring itself would not generate much revenue for the band if it weren't for the sale or merchandise on the tour, and it doesn't generate any direct revenue at all for the label. But that doesn't mean that the live performances are simply advertisements. Likewise, just because music videos, like radio singles and touring, may serve to promote the band and the album, it doesn't mean that that is their sole purpose.
Why would record labels fork out thousands of dollars for touring support? It serves to advertise the album, but the content still retains its intrinsic entertainment/artistic value. Art and entertainment aren't defined by their financial viability. There are indie bands and directors that create music videos which aren't ever played on MTV or VH1. Why do you think they spend the time and effort to make these videos? Believe it or not, some artists aren't just in it for the money.
It's not not narrowminded, it's shortsighted. But why would anyone want to trade music videos, collect them, or buy them on DVDs if they're just advertisement? How do people like Chris Cunningham make money by selling music video compilations if all they are are advertisements?
An artist doesn't release their content under a free license, then they're being idiots. An artist does release their content under a free icense--they're just greedy sell-outs that want free PR. What exactly do you want from musicians?
Stating that people do purchase music videos isn't pedantic, neither is stating that lots of people simply enjoy watching music videos and appreciate them for their intrinsic entertainment/artistic value. Whether video sales are the main source of revenue for artists/labels is completely irrelevant. A creative work doesn't have to be profitable, or 'financially viable', to have artistic or entertainment value. Likewise, just because music videos boost sales doesn't mean that they are merely advertisements. Are singles just advertisements as well because they are played on the radio to boost sales? What about merchandise like t-shirts and posters? Touring and live performances would be 'financially unviable' too for most artists if merchandise weren't sold at each show. Does that mean that the musical performances themselves are just advertisements?
I happen to work in the music industry and know lots of musicians, many of whom have produced music videos with their bands. It is a very artistically driven process, much like the creation of any other creative work. The same energy and creative process goes into it as with the production of the album itself. It is simply adding a visual narrative to the music and gives the artist another channel to express themselves through. Playing a music video on MTV or VH1 is no different from playing a single on the radio. The intrinsic value of the creative content doesn't change just because it's being played to promote the album. Most of the music videos that indie artists produce don't even get any play on the air--which is why they are often hard to get funding for--but bands still push for them to be made just as they may push for the label to help them record an album regardless of whether it's going to sell or not. Directors like Chris Cunningham have made prolific careers out of just making music videos, which people watch and buy for its inherent entertainment value.
That is retarded. I'd venture to say that 99% of the people who download the video simply want to watch the video in its entirety. Downloading it just to rip the audio layer is like getting an illustrated book to cut out just the text. Just because you can't appreciate music videos for what they are doesn't mean that other people can't either. You don't seem to understand a lot of things about music or art.
Your statements are tautological. Ofcourse the study of evolution is the study of how one adapts to environmental conditions. The driving force is survival, but the outcome is not always known--like how a species might adapt to higher tempuratures.
There might infinite ways a species might adapt to the same environmental conditions, so it's not as trivial as you seem to think. And I don't think you fully understand the experiment they conducted.
They performed the experiment twice. But they may have collected millions of data points. For a genetic mutation to qualify as evolutionary change and be relevant to the subject, it has to effect the majority of the population. Depending on the population size, the genetic mutation may have been reproduced in several hundred to several million or more individuals.
And there is nothing wrong with creating a theory after a single experiment. Just because there's only been one or two experiments doesn't mean you can't produce a scientific hypothesis. Afterall, that is the whole point of conducting the experiment. Without a theory proposal, what predictions are you going to try to test in future experiments?
I don't think you understand what a theory is. It's just a hypothesis to be tested by experimentation. The more its predictions have been tested and confirmed, the more it will be accepted. If future experiments produce results contrary to the predictions, it may refute the theory. Over time, incorrect/inaccurate theories will inevitably give way to correct/more accurate ones. So there's nothing wrong or unsound about producing a theory based on the results of just two experiments. It's not gonna end up in any textbooks until it is confirmed more rigorously, but the process has to start somewhere.
Not as "brain dead" as someone who hasn't a clue about the purpose of the FDA, EPA, and other regulatory agencies that prevent industries and self-interested corporate entities (which allow individuals to be relieved of personal responsibility for their actions in their money/power/resource grab) from destroying society.
Without government, what recourse do you have against a megacorporation that is polluting your environment, creating health hazards, monopolizing resources, or encroaching on your civil liberties?
Without government regulation, who's to protect consumers from a meat procuder that knowling sells beef contaminated by mad cow disease? or an automobile manufacturer that sells unsafe vehicles? or power companies that create fake shortages to hike-up prices artificially?
I suppose you think we should go back to the days when labor exploitation was legal, it was ok to use whatever dangerous ingredients you wanted in food products, drug manufacturers didn't have to label or test their products before selling them to the masses, and corporations had no accountability for their environmental, economic, or social impact?
What is that supposed to mean?
They produced a music video, as musicians sometimes do.
They released it under a Creative Commons license, which is rare.
This allows people to do rare things with a mainstream artist's creative content, like download it/enjoy it/distribute it for free.
Most artists would have prohibited the above mentioned activities in their license.
Thus, what Pearl Jam has done is interesting news for most of us, and it would benefit fans if other artists followed Pearl Jam's lead.
So what is there for you to possibly complain about? That they haven't sold many CDs at your store? What does that have to do with anything?
Do you have a coherent point to make, or did you just want to post incoherent ramblings?
Playing a music video on MTV may be considered advertising for the album, but so is playing the single on the radio. That doesn't make the actual content devoid of artistic & entertainment value in itself. I collect music videos, both downloaded off the net and purchased on DVDs, so I don't think that they're just advertisements. They should be available for free in addition to for purchase on DVDs, but saying that their just advertisements is an insult to the people who work on the videos.
shouldn't the quotes be around "advertized"?
I don't get why people complain about IP and anti-piracy laws, but when artists actually start embracing the whole music-sharing rhetoric people get upset that it gets reported and accuse the artists of pulling a publicity stunt.
I mean, are we trying to convince artists that we don't want them to let people download/share music for free? What is the problem here? What does it take for people to stop complaining about the music industry?
Where the hell did you get "it's free until May 24th" from? It's licensed under the Creative Commons license. That means you can freely download/distribute it indefinitely. May 24th is just when the official download will no longer be available. The whole point of allowing fans to distribute it is to--duh--allow fans to distribute it.
And you can download it in a variety of formats. The flash version is just for the convenience of people who want to stream it from their browser. If you want it in AVI format, you can download it from the link on the side.
Your reading comprehension & website navigation abilities are the only things here that are pathetic. If you wanna complain about something, atleast try to grasp what the situation is...
If the artists actually cared about getting their music out, they wouldn't mind people sharing videos or even the albums. The reason why the record labels care is because they're too shortsighted and greedy. Most record execs just can't stand the notion of people enjoying the content for free. It doesn't matter that this creates more buzz, more fans, more sales in the long run--it's the principles. It's just like people who complain about hand-outs being given to the less fortunate (I mean, are you really jealous of people who get hand-outs because they actually need them?). They're the kind of people who worry more about welfare going to a few freeloaders than taking comfort in the fact that it also helps millions of single mothers and dispossessed families keep food on the table.
It's irrational stinginess that serves no purpose, but is just ingrained in prevailing industry attitudes. So most labels don't put out music videos for free because they want everyone to buy the DVD if they actually want to watch the music video. They don't see that a music video played on millions of people's computers has the same marketing value as one played on millions of television sets on MTV or VH1. There's really nothing wrong with selling music videos on DVDs, but it is in the best interest of the musicians and the label to also provide the content for free.
It has nothing to do with fear of people extracting the audio layer from the music videos. That's just ridiculous. What Pearl Jam is doing is definitely appreciated by a lot of fans, and it isn't being done by most mainstream musicians so I don't get why people are accusing them of just pulling a "publicity stunt". Just because it's in their best interest doesn't mean it's a publicity stunt. This is actually good for the fans as well, and it might encourage others to follow suit.
Sentiments like yours only hinder the adoption of these rational approaches to content distribution. I work for an indie record label, and I'm always trying to convince my boss that it makes sense to allow people to share music and to be more genrous with the content. But it really undermines these efforts when people like you react so cynically whenever a label starts thinking more progressively than others.
Why can't you simply accept that Pearl Jam is trying to do something nice for the fans?--which in turn also benefits the artist, which has always been the case. It's not good enough that they're derogating from conventions in a way that benefits the fans, but they must hurt themselves in the process for it to not be labelled as simply a "publicity stunt"?
I think people like you are a bit too jaded and don't really understand or appreciate what the music sharing movement is about. Artists and record labels don't have an obligation to take losses just so you can enjoy the music they produce, however, there are practices that are mutually beneficial. Just because the artists/labels stand to benefit from the content they produce doesn't mean that they're evil or something. So stop ragging on the good guys in the industry who are actually embracing free content and music sharing.
Except music videos aren't advertisements; how does adding a cinematic dimension to the musical content reduce it to advertising?
Music videos may be used to advertise the album, but so are the songs on the album when they're played on the radio or broadcasted elsewhere--does that the album itself an "advertisement"? Touring also helps sell albums--does that mean concert goers are just being suckered into paying for "advertisements"?
And just because you can't make money off of the video or create derivative works from it doesn't mean it's not free anymore. They're being a lot more generous with their work than most major artists and are setting a good precendent for others to follow. So stop skewing the situation just so you can make substanceless complaints.
This has nothing to do with bandwidth quotas. It has to do with the quality of the connection and connection priority. You will still be charged by the volume of traffic, but you will also have to pay extra for connection reliability/availability.
Basically it allows the ISPs to provide you with a crappy connection by default unless you pay a premium to have priority over other internet traffic. This means they can now oversell their connection as a standard practice and then charge people extra to actually be provided with the service that they signed up/paid for.
It's rather unethical in my opinion. When I pay for webhosting I expect 99% uptime. I shouldn't have to pay extra to actually be guaranteed the service I already paid for. If there is a bandwidth shortage, then the ISP needs to upgrade or not oversell their bandwidth.
Imagine if your cellphone provider only offered you service 25% of the time unless you agreed to pay another extra monthly fee to be a "tier 1" customer. You wouldn't be able to use your cellphone when you want/need to. And even when you do manage to get service there'd be no guarantee that the person at the other end of the line will have service. It would effectively make cellphone communication unviable and useless.
The same principles apply to the internet. The internet is meant to be a persistent communications medium. If the tiered internet becomes a reality, only the largest websites and web service providers will be accessible by anyone from anywhere at any time. Other smaller sites/services will suffer a degradation in service quality in terms of reliability and availability such that accessing them would be a hassle to most users. The negative social and economic impact this would have on the internet would be enormous.
A primary characteristic of a police state is a mutually suspicious self-spying citizenry. The Nazis were able to retain so tight a grip on its citizens and on public attitudes because the entire German population became its informants. Much more realistic than having undercover agents around every corner was to simply have neighbors spy on neighbors, and use the public's own distrust of each other to turn them on themselves.
In fact, the Gestapo didn't have very many undercover agents except those used to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups. They relied primarily on denunciations submitted by ordinary citizens to "spy" on the public and keep tight control over German society. It was the willingness of ordinary Germans to denounce one another that supplied the Gestapo with a list of individuals to arrest and gave them their power. What is scarier: the thought that there might be NSA-employed domestic spies embedded in society or that your neighbors or any other ordinary citizen may be a potential government informant?
In an effective police state Big Brother doesn't need to be everywhere because the citizenry will spy on itself. You are naive if you think it's alright as long as it's ordinary citizens doing the spying, or that police states only exist when government surveilence infiltrates one's home.
I understand your point, but it still remains that unless proponents of ODF push for accessibility features to be added to other word-processors, the disabled community will only be left with one option. Under the current conditions, Word may be the best tool for their needs. But have you considered that handicapped individuals have just as diverse needs as non-handicapped individuals? If Word isn't good enough for the entire non-disabled community, then how is it good enough for the entire disabled community? What about disabled persons who prefer Linux and open source solutions?
The way I see it is, if the ODF movement is dedicated to providing "choices" to users, they should not neglect the disabled community.
First off, blindness isn't the only kind of disability out there. Secondly, you don't seem to have any clue as to what kind of accessibility features are included with Word. Just because you have never had to use these features, and thus have never looked for them, does not mean that they don't exist. Also, our society's general failure to take into account the needs of the disabled is not justification for the continuance of this problem.
Right now there are tons of features that make Word more usable for people with all sorts of disbilities. A lot of these features are used by people without handicaps as well. We don't realize that they provide vital accessibility improvements for the handicapped because they seem to accomplish tasks that are trivial for us. But for people with disabilities, these features indispensible. If you want to get a better idea of the kind of features that Microsoft offers for the disabled, then visit the Microsoft Accessibility website. Please educate yourself before spouting off ignorant uninformed nonsense.
Lastly, if you can't see the vendor lock-in (and other problems) created by the situations you described then you really need to think a bit harder (Hint: Imagine if you were handicapped). Your inability to empathize with others in a different situation from yours is really quite sad.
That's not the point. One of the main benefits of ODF is supposed to be the prevention of vendor lock-ins due to the use of proprietary formats. It's designed as an open alternative to Word documents, and many (including government agencies) plan to migrate to ODF. This is supposed to save people a lot of money and make public documents more accessible.
Saying "oh, disabled people can just stick to Word" leaves the disabled community in practically the same situation as before, except that now there's a higher chance that they'll encounter machines with some word-processor other than MS Word installed on it.
The disabled community just want to be able to receive the same benefits from ODF as the rest of society. I mean, why should they be locked in to a single vendor? How can schools/public institutions switch over to free software by adopting ODF if non-MS packages don't have accessibility options for the disabled?
This isn't about whether disabled people can still use ODF--it's whether the ODF movement is really about the values and ideals that its proponents expound. ODF advocates claim there are benefits to the adoption of an open format, but they seem to ignore a significant segment of our society with special needs; that is what the DPC is afraid of. And comments like yours simply confirm their fears.
Oh, so you were advocating peace? Gosh, I wasn't aware that Improv Everywhere was going around instigating violence and carrying out acts of aggression against others. I thought they were just "disruptive" in the sense that they planned interactive public performances that involved the audience in a direct and personal way . Thus, disrupting the mundane situations that they inject these performances into.
I'm sorry, I totally misjudged you. Apparently you're just a peace-loving fellow who wants to put an end to the Improv Everywhere menace that has been terrorizing the community. Your disparaging remarks and condescending tone definitely do not make you come off as an asshole. Clearly you're not being too uptight about people simply wearing blue polo shirts and khaki pants in a cleverly engineer situation (the audacity of these people...). All of us who find these performances amusing must be 'morons' just as you say...
Funny, you deny being overly uptight, but you seem to have a rudely condescending attitude towards people who simply enjoy a little benign and lighthearted fun. Is my recreational drug use (done in the privacy of my own home) too disruptive as well? Or are you simply a dick towards drug users because you just don't like people who lead a different lifestyle from yours?
You can call anything that affects you 'disruptive'. Anything that captures your eye briefly, causes you to break a stride, throws you slightly off your usual routine, or simply makes you pause for a moment's thought can be considered disruptive. Simply seeing two guys make-out in public, which you may not be used to, can be extremely disruptive to some people. Just because it's disruptive doesn't make it wrong or necessarily bad. If seeing two guys making-out upsets you, maybe you just need to get out more and learn to be more open-minded. You can choose to be annoyed by the slightest unexpected situation, or you can choose not to.
For instance, in college I was always very sociable towards other people, especially my freshman year since I was from out of state and didn't know anyone at my school. I said 'Hi' to everyone I met and made an effort to socialize with complete strangers. This was well-received by most people, and I immediately made a lot of friends. However, there were always one or two people who, no matter how many times I greeted, would never reply or even acknowledge my presence.
I'm sure those individuals probably found my persistent efforts to socialize with them to be very disruptive. It may have even annoyed them (which is why I eventually gave up). But in the context of the situation, I was just trying to be friendly, and they simply weren't used to it or something.
There will always be people like that--people who don't want to engage in smalltalk at the bus stop, people who avoid eye contact when they walk past you, or give you dirty looks when you smile at them, but that doesn't mean we should all just go through our daily routines avoiding any kind of social interactions with each other because some people might find it 'disruptive' or 'annoying'. Maybe that's what you'd call 'peaceful', but I call it 'boring'.
Similarly, just because you choose to be annoyed by a little harmless fun doesn't mean the IE agents are in the wrong. The improv players in the video weren't approaching any customers or getting in people's way. They were just standing around in blue poloshirts and khaki pants. Most people seem to find the sessions entertaining, including the bystanders involved from all the videos I've seen. The only people getting irrate about it seem to be those with a compulsive need to keep people in line at all times--cops, for instance. So it seems like you're just too uptight about all of this.
Yes, you have the right to be a dick, but that's what makes these improv sessions so hilarious sometimes. Some people are just too uptight and get easily annoyed by completely harmless lighthearted fun.
Unfortunately for people like you, public places are shared by everyone--including people who like to create "disruptive" social situations in an attempt to inject humor and an element of the unexpected into the lives of people around them. Best Buy may not be public property, but it is publicly accessible nonetheless, and all members of the public are invited to frequent the stores. If you don't like it, you can open your own electronics store and bar whomever you want from entering it.
Some people appreciate the departure from the mundane and enjoy a little spontaneity in their lives. Others, who can't handle not being in complete control of a situation, might lose their cool and react with hostility. That's just a risk that these individuals have to take, and it's something that, unfortunately, everyone else in society also has to put up with.
So just as you have the right to act like you've got a stick up your ass, others have the right to create absurd/comedic social situations in public places to try to make life more interesting. If you don't want to be "disrupted" by unexpected situations, then stay home. Because as soon as you step foot out that door, you are no longer in control. People are free to make offhand remarks, act silly, or otherwise be as disruptive as they want without encroaching on your rights as an individual. You can either piss and moan about other people having a little harmless, or you can just learn to not be so uptight all the time.
I think the problem is more that most people tend to settle into a very comfortable daily routine that they simply don't like disrupted in any way. It threatens them when a new and alien situation arises and they don't know what to expect. How the employees reacted was perfectly understandable, but that's why they do these improv shows.
People have to realize that in life there will always been situations where you aren't in complete control and things can't be predicted. The key is not to immediately panic or react with hostility when such circumstances come up. Hopefully those that participated in the event involuntarily were able to step back and have a laugh at the end of it all after realizing how paranoid they reacted to a perfectly harmless situation.
Injecting a little unexpected humor into the lives of others can only improve our society. People need to lighten up and stop assuming the worst about each other.
Should they have taken it out on Improv Everywhere or the manager that called them and wasted public resources for a non-emergency?
How is he manipulating people? I see Improv Everywhere as people who want to make the lives of those around them more interesting. It's a creative and humorous way to disrupt mundane reality, much like culture jamming movements. Compared to trying to psychoanalyze other people and putting them down for harmless well-intentioned public stunts, I'd say you exhibit more negative personality traits than these individuals. You're looking to hard to find malicious intentions where there is none. They aren't persecuting, bullying, exploiting, manipulating, or otherwise hurting other people. They just enjoy creating interesting social situations that most participants can get a good laugh from. Perhaps if one is too uptight, it would be a nuisance and irrate them, but I think that's the exact kind of uptightness that these groups of people intend to disrupt.
You can say that about any art form. Groundbreaking works only come around ever so often. That's what makes them 'groundbreaking'. You can't expect every piece of anime/cinema/whatever to be exceptional--otherwise they really wouldn't be 'exceptional' then, would they?
What makes a masterpiece a masterpiece is its relative ingenuity/brilliance compared to the rest of the genre. So no matter how much a particular genre advances or improves as a whole, there inevitably will only be a handful that is set apart from the rest as phenomenal works--just as most pro athletes today are probably on par or better than legendary hall-of-famers of the past, but in the contemporary landscape only a few stand out. If every anime was "exceptional", then really none of them would be exceptional.
As an art form, anime is still advancing steadily just as it always has. As with all art, it will always be dominated by established mainstream themes and conventions that become hackneyed and repetitive over time. Mainstream cultural segments naturally stagnate due to a lack of experimentation--which only occurs in cultural fringes. But ever so often, a fringe breakthrough in creative/artistic thinking will gain widespread success and popularity, rippling through the entire cultural landscape of the art/genre, thus reshaping it. As its success seeps into the mainstream, those qualities which had set it apart from the rest will gradually be adopted by others until that particular creative/artistic fringe is fully assimilated into the mainstream ...and becomes hackneyed and repetitive.
That's just how art works. It's the same with all art forms, including: anime, music, movies, videogame design, and even software development. Real ingenuity is always rare and only comes from cultural fringes. And such groundbreaking phenomena only last but a brief moment until it is appropriated by the mainstream due to its own success, at which point the audience becomes disatisfied once again and demands something more groundbreaking.
You can just as easily find crappy animes produced in earlier decades as you can find contemporary ones that are the same stupid drivel. In fact, I'd argue that since anime has gained greater popularity--and thus more creative energy and resources--it's actually a lot more innovative in recent years than in the past. We just only remember good animes which have endured as classics while our collective cultural memory simply forgets about all the crappy ones.
Well, if you set a max-width property, aren't people still going to complain if their resolution width is higher than the max-width?
The problem with autoresizing layouts is that you lose a lot of editorial control over content layout. For pages that are just straight-forward single-article documents, this isn't much of a problem. However, most home pages of large, content-rich sites follow a magazine/newspaper-frontpage layout. So the content is divided up into several columns and panels with custom graphics accompany different features. Most of the graphics are typically the width of a single column of text, or multiple columns if that panel happens to span more than one regular column. Now, the column text can easy expand horizontally with the layout, but the graphics will stay the same size. This'll end up creating a lot of large patches of white-space in the middle of the page, which looks very ugly.
From an editor/graphic designer's perspective, a fixed width layout is really the best way to go. Aside from that, it's also much more annoying to read huge long lines of horizontal text than it is to simply scroll down a page as you read--hence why newspaper/magazine articles are written in columns, and why most documents are longer than they are wide.
The whole "wasted screen realestate" complaint is just jibberish. It's not as if you gain any extra value from a layout that takes up 100% of your screen's width. It's not like you're watching a movie and you actually get more out of having the picture fit your screen perfectly. It's still just the same amount of web content. Web layouts are designed to be around the same width as a normal physical document because that's really the ideal width for reading text.
When you read magazine you don't hold up the magazine so that all you can see in your field of vision is the page you're on. In fact that'd probably be pretty annoying. Even when you watch a movie you wouldn't want to be sitting so close to the screen so that the edges of the picture are rigth where your field of vision ends. So what difference does it make if there's extra screen space that isn't being used? Having a 30" monitor at 1900x1200 resolution doesn't mean you have to read everything from one edge of the screen to the other. If you have a 15" monitor and you have the resolution set that high then you're just being silly by setting the resolution at an unreadable level for yourself.
A Takashi Miike classic. He's the guy who also directed Ichi the Killer... a masterpiece of Japanese shock cinema.
D.O.A. is simply awesome. Tons of action, sex, gratuitous violence, and it's got some pretty hilarious moments as well. But be warned, there is jap scat and bestiality portrayed in this film. It's not as bad as Ichi the Killer in most ways, but it's still pretty unsettling. Definitely not for the feint of heart.
If you enjoy D.O.A., I'd also recommend:
Ichi the Killer -- The reason why Takashi Miike is a god amongst shock cinema fans
The Agitator -- Not a shock/gore flick, but a masterpiece nonetheless. I guess I'd describe it as The Godfather set in the Japanese Yakuza underworld (a favorite subject matter of Miike's).
Zebraman -- A film about an unlikely and hilariously absurd superhero.
Oldboy is a pretty awesome Korean movie you might enjoy if you like Ichi the Killer.
ughh....
Why is it that Hollywood refuses to cast any full-blooded asian actresses/actors for the roles of asian characters? Devon Aoki has got to be the whitest looking "japanese" chick I have ever seen. She's only something like 1/5th or 1/4th japanese and has to be dressed up in komonos or other stereotypical japanese garmets to be identified as "oriental". Why not just cast an asian actress who actually looks the part naturally?
The problem with actresses like Devon Aoki is that they have to imitate preconceived hollywood archetypes of "orientalness" in order to portray the ethnic identity of their characters. This means wearing "asian" costumes and really ridiculous and exagerrated make-up--to give them "oriental" shaped eyes, etc. It also means portraying their character in such a way as to emulate (and perpetuate) cultural/ethnic stereotypes--did Aoki have a single spoken line in Sin City? Ofcourse not, she was just supposed to strike silly histrionic poses and look 'cute' and 'oriental'.
It'd be nice to actually see an asian character in a hollywood production portrayed as more than just a cultural/ethnic stereotype. All Devon Aoki characters completely lack emotional depth or any kind of discernible personality the audience can actually identify with. The focus is always on the exoticness, or 'otherness', of the character's ethnic/cultural identity, thus no effort is made to develop the role into anything more than just a flat, one-dimensional prop-character.
It's just plain insulting.